Lloyd Jones would spend Friday evenings at church slowly working through the book of Romans in an expository fashion. This took him a number of years to accomplish, preaching a total of 353 sermons in the series. This makes for a total of 290 hours and 20 minutes of sermon. Lloyd Jones numbers among the great preachers of all time, preaching in a conservative fashion from the Reformed perspective. In most cases he is fairly conventional, though at times he does bring objections to the most eminent Reformed theologians. In particular, his perspective on Romans 7 is unique, in that he holds this chapter as speaking of the non-converted sinner under conviction of sin. So, it is neither the non-converted person you would find on the street, nor the converted. His perspective on what Paul meant by “Israel” and the “Jew” are also somewhat at odds with convention, though he is quite firmly not a British-Israelite. Altogether, it is solid teaching and very informative. These sermons were listened to by me over the last several years while I was riding the bicycle on the trainer in the garage. As you might detect, I worked out a lot.

Recently, I perused a sermon of Lloyd-Jones in print that addressed the mystery of the incarnation – of Mary and her conception. This is not a topic for beginners and I was hoping that Jones would exercise some carefulness in avoiding the many spurious assumptions that people drag into it. I was somewhat disappointed, though for a popular sermon, it mainly stayed on track.

Jones insisted that Joseph had nothing to do with Mary’s conception, and from the standpoint of the usual kind of activity, the scripture is clear that this did not happen. However, this does not mean that the genome of Jesus did not contain any contribution of Joseph’s genome. Jones did not venture to try to explain, if Joseph was so utterly isolated from the conception as he claims, why Matthew bothers to trace his otherwise pointless and irrelevant genealogy. Jones (after much dithering around) did emphasize that the whole thing is a mystery, though that does not keep people from speculating – and making spurious assumptions – about it.

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